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Saturday, 8 March 2014

Optical Computers

Optical computers could well be in
general use just 20 years from now with overwhelming benefits. Optical computers
will be faster because light moves so much faster than electrons mired in
silicon.

Optical computers offer a radical
change in the way information is handled. While electronic computers work with
single bits of information. optical computers can process whole image
potentially billions of bits at one time. For image processing especially the
result is a radical increase in computing speed. For example, computer scientist
Kristina Johnson of the University of Colorado designed an optical processor
that cloud identify cancer cells on a pape smear. For a standard electronic
computer, this task would have required a major commitment of processor time and
memory and still would have meant a lengthy wait for the results. The optical
processor did the job virtually instantaneously.

Like many other advances in
technology conversing entire computers to work with light has proved more
difficult than scientists once imagined. Even if the vision of all or mostly
optical computers could materialized in the next 10 years it would force
computer companies to discard an enormous investment in the factories that make
memory chips and hard drives something they'd be unlikely to do.

But specialized optical components
will almost surely have arrived in the next 15 years and computers that are
mostly optical will be nearing the market. The result could be shirt pocket
computers with even greater power than we can now imagine.

Other types of breakthroughs will
also be needed to make all of these technologies truly work for us. Software to
run them needs to be developed. In this area we see only two major innovations
that are likely to pay off in the early twenty first century.

One is object oriented programming
(OOP) systems which are the building blocks of the software world. Instead of
writing each segment of every new piece of software from scratch. OOP
programmers create reusable modules or objects that can be knit together.
Instead of creating the entire project from a blank page the programmer need
only write the links between these objects and perhaps a few lines of highly
specialized instructions unique to that project. The potential savings in time
and reduction of errors are obvious benefits.

The new computers will bring chaos o
the workplace just as their predecessor technologies have done. In the past 20
years assembly line robots have displaced well over half of the human workers
who once looked to factory jobs a middle class living.

Technology has destroyed the jobs of
countless mid level executives as computerized management methods allow the
survivors to oversee up to 21 subordinates instead of only six computerization
has also made it increasingly easy for one company to absorb its rivals sending
still more people to the unemployment lines. Recently computers have begun to
streamline operations in the service industries the last stronghold of human
labour. Again the opportunities for human workers are shrinking.

Cheaper and vastly more powerful
computers can only hasten this trend. Who needs to pay a human sales person when
business customers can e mail their order directly to the computer that does the
accounting and controls the production equipment? Or when intelligent machines
can make an effective sales call to new retail customers? Even writers and
artists may be in danger. Already some Hollywood screen writers rely on their
software to construct salable plot outlines and one experimental program
reportedly can write believable dialogue by reweaving fragments from real
conversations. And who needs human doctors when the next generation of expert
systems will be able to make most diagnoses?

For a time the health care industry
can absorb many of the people displaced by this new more capable brand of
automation. After all sick people still need human hands to tend them. But soon
fewer people will be sick enough to require their care.

As a result most of us will spend
our entire working lives bouncing from one career to the next scrambling to
learn the skills of a new profession before some computer snatches away our
current livelihood.

The second key innovation for making
computer work for us is artificial intelligence (AI). In the years to come. Al
will get a boost of interest from researchers thanks to the growing power of
computers. It takes a lot of memory and processing capacity to mimic the human
mind. Ten years from now we will all have computers potent enough to incorporate
very sophisticated forms of AI.

Future products must be both
powerful and easy to use. They must take order from people who are to interested
in learning complex commands or even in using a mouse to pick them from a menu.
They must be in short intelligent. There are two ways to create machine
intelligence of a high order. One is to give your computer common sense by
providing a context the kind of background information that enables people to
interpret new data. The other is to give it the ability to learn. Researchers
are hard at work on both approaches and this work is likely to converge.

In the future computers will combine
vast stores of context with dedicated learning software. Our machines will
behave in ways that seem human. If sometimes a bit stilted and too literal
minded. If we give them an ambiguous or open ended order they will interpret it
according to their knowledge of us. More often than not they will get it right
and as they gain experience they will do better still. In 20 years we may
already have begun to take these intelligent helpful and artificial companions
for granted.